Breaking open the gates

Teresa Frye knows that what she is about to say could make some people angry
but she needs to say it anyway.

"It's wrong," the 46-year-old says in her North Carolina twang,
"for me to say that it's perfectly acceptable for an adult survivor of
sexual abuse to stay silent about what happened to them."

Frye, a single working mother of four, feels so strongly that sex abuse
victims should report their abusers that she recently traveled 900 miles and
spent hundreds of dollars to help support a woman she knew only through
Facebook on her quest to tell investigators her story of childhood molestation.

The trip, which she helped coordinate with several other like-minded women,
was the culmination of a core-shaking journey that Frye started about seven
years earlier as she sought to make sense of the eight months she spent as a
child at New
Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, La.

For some in the general public, the religious boarding school for wayward
youth had been little more than fodder for occasional newspaper stories
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Accusations
of children being abused there bubbled into local and national media over
the years and lawsuits between the school and the state wound their way into
and out of state and federal court.

But for residents like Frye, the boarding school became a memory they tried
to forget. She says that while she was there, she witnessed abuse and
degradation, but was not herself the victim of sexual abuse. In 2007, when Frye
stumbled across an online message board containing hundreds of conversations
between former residents, she felt her life pivot.

"I started reading it and probably for a week I did nothing else at
night besides read and read and read," Frye says. "After getting away
from it and not thinking about it and shoving it to the back of your head and
trying to live your life, it's not real anymore."

It wasn't enough to read the comments; Frye wanted answers -- and solutions
-- and quickly found herself as one in what is an expansive and tightly woven
network of people interested in exposing and ending institutional abuse of
children. She joined with national groups like Survivors
of Institutional Abuse and HEAL, which offer resources and support for people who
say they were abused in religious boarding homes similar to New Bethany.

"I started finding out that there were places opening up all over the
United States that had the same theological teachings," Frye says. "I
thought at the time that (New Bethany) was a one-of-a-kind place and that no
one would ever believe what happened there."

Jennifer Halter, left, wipes away tears as Sylvia McMillan, middle, and Teresa Frye talk about the abuse that they say occurred at New Bethany Home for Girls.

Searching for answers

Over the course of the past seven years, Frye has found herself on the phone
with journalists, filmmakers and police investigators. While looking for
answers, she rediscovered her faith in a higher power, one she feels opened
doors that for so long have appeared shut.

Frye and a team of friends hunted down answers for a man who was haunted
by a his last memory of a friend from New Bethany Home for Boys in
Longstreet, La., a school that was later shuttered amid complaints of abuse.
The man said he remembered a boy named "Guy" being beaten so badly
that his eyes bled. The next day, he told Frye, Guy disappeared from the home.

Frye, who worked as a private investigator assistant before becoming a legal
case manager in a North Carolina law firm 10 years ago, spent hours and months
trying to find out what had happened to him before finally confirming he had
died as an adult -- information that came to her through what she has come to
believe was divine intervention.

"I told God that I couldn't find him and He needed to show me where he
was," she says. Seconds later, she says, she did a Google search for a
name that she had searched hundreds of times before and the information popped
up. "That's what really knocked me off my knees."

In Frye's determination to find answers and solutions, though, she sometimes
manages to rub others the wrong way. Of the four women who recently went to law
enforcement to file reports of sexual abuse at the New Bethany while they were
residents there, one said she just had to do it in her own time and felt Frye
was abrasive in her zeal to get people like her to report.

Frye says she recognizes that her actions and statements can seem harsh to
some, but she doesn't see a way around it. Sexual abuse doesn't end, she says,
when one victim grows up; perpetrators who aren't stopped find other children
to harm.

"The general consensus that I have seen is that a victim of a childhood
sexual crime doesn't have to report it if they don't want," Frye says,
"but yet these victims will go and post what happened to them online.
We're not going to 'awareness' people to death."

Frye thinks of her recent trip to Arcadia to support another woman on her
quest to tell police about her childhood abuse as a rough model of what should
happen more often. Statistics indicate that one in five girls and one in 20
boys are victims
of child sexual abuse.

"Look here!" Frye says with urgency. "Get a posse of people
together and report the (perpetrator). Raise a stink! Raise a big ol' stink!
This is what's working and other people need to see what's working."

REPORTING: Rebecca Catalanello
Rebecca Catalanello is a reporter with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. She has reported extensively on health and health care in Louisiana.

PHOTOS & VIDEOS: Kathleen Flynn
Kathleen Flynn is a photojournalist with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune who has reported widely on issues affecting women and children. In 2013 she won the prestigious Casey Medal for a series of stories on unlicensed religious children's homes in Florida.

PRESENTATION: Diya Chacko
Diya Chacko is a web and SEO producer with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune.